


Enough Is Enough

by RedGazelle



Category: Star-Crossed (TV 2014)
Genre: Argument and Reconciliation, Atrians, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-14
Updated: 2014-03-14
Packaged: 2018-01-15 16:34:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1311652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedGazelle/pseuds/RedGazelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Roman has been infuriatingly over-protective of Emery, especially since the carnival.  Forget not wanting a relationship like that, Emery isn't sure she can keep up a friendship like that either.</p><p>Now, Emery has been asked to participate in a series of interviews about the integration program.  While Emery gladly agrees, Roman is not happy at all.  When he goes too far while trying to protect her again, Emery snaps.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Enough Is Enough

“Absolutely not,” Roman said.

“It’s Emery’s decision, Roman,” Gloria said.  Though Gloria’s words sounded soothing, Emery knew there was more threat in them than her tone let on.  Gloria had a lot riding on the integration program, and having been approached by a local news crew to interview the human students and the Atrian Seven about how things were going, ‘No’ wasn’t an option.

“I’d love to,” Emery said.  Not that Emery wanted to say no anyway.

Roman started to object, but Gloria cut him off.  “Wonderful, Emery.  Then I will see you here after school tomorrow.”

Emery smiled intentionally avoiding looking at Roman.  His over-protective act was really starting to tick her off.  “Sure,” she said as she walked out of the classroom, Roman close on her heels.  She barely made it out of earshot before Roman started up.

“What do you think you are doing?” he demanded.

Emery kept walking.  “Agreeing to an interview supporting the integration program?”  She meant it to be a statement, but it came out a lot more like sarcasm.

“You shouldn’t do that.”  Roman’s voice was agitated, kind of like it always was now.  Emery wondered if she had dreamed the sweet, snarky, flirtatious guy she met the first few days of school.  He was certainly nowhere to be found now.  “It will draw too much attention to you, Emery.  You are in enough danger as it is.”

Emery still didn’t stop walking.  “It’s done, Roman.  I already told Gloria I would.”

Roman caught her arm.  “Then go back and tell her that you changed your mind.”  The words were a suggestion, but his tone sounded a lot like a command.

‘Enough,’ she thought.  ‘I have had enough.’  Without thinking about it, Emery turned and shoved Roman back, away from her.  She pushed hard and he stumbled briefly before regaining his balance.  His eyes widened in shock.  She hadn’t meant to, but she did mean it, and it was a little late to stop now.

“Emery...”

“Don’t,” she said, cutting him off.  “Just don’t, Roman.  I am fed up with you acting like you know what’s best for me.”

“I’m not...”

“You are.  And I’m done putting up with it.  You don’t know what’s best for me, Roman.  You don’t even know me.  You met me once, ten years ago.  You didn’t know me then, and you haven’t cared to get to know me now.  You won’t even be seen with me, so how could you possibly know anything significant about me?”  Roman’s lips thinned into a line.  Emery had pissed him off.  ‘Good,’ she thought.  She immediately felt a twinge of guilt.  Those things were only partially true and she was being cruel.  She tried to rein herself back, succeeding only partially.  “You treat me like I am fragile and could break at any moment, and you think you need to protect me because of it.  But I’m not weak, Roman, if you knew me at all, you would know that.  And not only do I not need you to protect me, I don’t want you to.  That isn’t any kind of friendship.”

“Friendship?  You think this is about friendship?”  Roman’s hands clenched into fists at his sides.  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.  You’ve been targeted already.  And they will keep targeting you.  Especially if you go through with the pro-integration interview tomorrow.”

“Let them.  I’m not afraid of being a target.”  That wasn’t exactly true, but any admission of fear felt like an acceptance of his over-protection.

“You should be,” Roman said.

“I’m not.”  Roman opened his mouth to object again, but Emery shook her head.  “I won’t let fear keep me from living.”  That, at least, was absolutely true.

Roman sighed, angry and exasperated.  “No one is asking you to, Emery.  I’m asking you to be reasonable and to not invite trouble.”

“You don’t know what you’re asking.  You never bothered to find out.”  Sure, he may have wanted to, but what mattered was that he didn’t.

Roman narrowed his eyes.  “You could get hurt, Emery.  You could die!”  Roman was almost shouting at her.  Maybe she had misjudged his reaction.  Maybe she hadn’t made him angry but had hurt him instead.  Or both was certainly a possibility.  Either way, there was definitely pain behind his eyes as he tried not to shout at her.

‘I could die?’ she thought.  ‘So could you.  I’m not blind; I can see how reckless you’re being.’  But she didn’t say those things, because while she wasn’t blind, Roman was.  He thought he was doing the right thing, the only thing, and telling him bluntly that he was being foolish wouldn’t change his mind.  Instead she gave him a different, but no less important, truth.  “Yes,” she said.  “I could.  But that is true whether I do this or not.”

For the first time in this conversation, ‘ok, argument,’ Roman didn’t try to say anything.  Concern and confusion pulled at the markings beneath his eyes.  Emery took his silence as a license to continue.

“I sure you couldn’t forget what happened to Sophia at the pool if you tried, right?”  Emery waited until Roman gave a slight nod.  “The reason I knew how to help her was because I’ve had to do the same thing for myself since I was 4 years old.  By the time you met me when we were children, I had nearly died on three different occasions because I went into anaphylactic shock.  By then, not only was I responsible for making sure I always carried an Epipen and always asking what was in food before I ate it, I was also responsible for taking all my own meds.  I had to be if I was ever going to spend even 5 minutes away from my parents.  I had also been hospitalized plenty by then, and even more after.  My parents tried to make sure I didn’t know or overhear, but I always did, and there was more than one occasion where the doctors did not expect me to make it to my next birthday.”  Emery wondered if she was just imagining the color draining from Roman’s face.  If she was going to get through to him, though, she had to drive her point home.  “Always getting so sick, so easily, may have made me vulnerable, Roman, but it did _not_ make me weak.  And I don’t need someone in my life who thinks of me, or treats me, that way.”

It was the strongest, truest, most honest statement she could make.  No matter what she felt for Roman, she couldn’t be around him if, to keep her from dying, he would happily keep her from living too.  Before he could respond, Emery turned to go.  “I would like your support tomorrow, Roman, but I am doing this interview with or without it.”  Anger again tightened Roman’s jaw, but Emery walked away before it reached his eyes.

Emery headed straight outside, refusing to look back: tomorrow was going to be interesting.

***

Roman did not find her before the interview to talk.  In fact, Emery had started to worry that he wasn’t going to show up at all, which would have been fair give the awful things she had said to him.  Emery glanced at the clock.  They had taken most of the afternoon to prepare everyone: hair, make-up, running over the interview questions.  Now, it was six o’clock.  Her interview was going to start any moment; hers was going to be first since they hadn’t been able to find Roman yet.  The reporter and Gloria were still chatting about last minute details, but she knew they would wrap up soon.  Finally, as the reporter sat down in the chair next to Emery’s, Roman walked in the door.  He met her eyes for a long moment, as if to say ‘I don’t like this, but you asked for my support, so here I am.’

Emery’s interview went without incident, and Gloria and the reporter decided to do Roman’s next, forgoing hair, make-up, and rehearsal.  It went smoothly regardless.

When his interview ended, he sat down in the row in front of Emery.  After a moment to work up her courage, she leaned forward and whispered, “Can we talk?”

Roman said nothing, but finally nodded.  He got up and made his way out of the room, and after several minutes, Emery followed.  She caught his eye, and without a word, walked past him in the hopes he would follow.  Thankfully, he did.  Emery lead them up to the roof, a secret place that she had found for herself to be alone.  After being alone so often growing up, sometimes the sheer volume of people in the school could get to be too much.  She settled down onto the gravel roof in the dark, somewhat surprised that it was night already.  Emery could tell that Roman was curious to ask about this place, but he said nothing.

She took a deep breath.  “I’m sorry,” she said.

“…You’re sorry?”

Emery didn’t know what to make of his tone or his expression, so she continued.  “Yeah.  I said a lot of things yesterday that were…hurtful.  I meant what I said about not wanting to be treated like I’m weak, but I didn’t need to throw it in your face that you have stayed away from me.  I know why you stayed away, even if I don’t agree.”

Roman ran one hand through his hair, mussing it.  “Thanks,” he said, as if unsure of what to do with her apology.

“Also,” Emery said, “I’m sorry I shoved you.  I wasn’t planning on it, it just sort of happened.  I was…”  She stopped, not knowing how to finish.

“Frustrated?”

“Yeah.”

“I have that effect on people.”

Emery snorted.  “Well if it makes you feel any better, so do I. Particularly this one Atrian guy I know...”

A grin tugged at his lips for a moment before Roman shook his head.  “I smother you with over-protection, and you apologize to me.”

Emery’s eyes widened, betraying her confusion.  “You deserved one,” she insisted.

Roman looked her in the eyes.  “So do you.  I’m sorry, Emery.  I knew I was being a jerk to you, on purpose if that would keep you safe, but I didn’t think that I might be doing more damage than good.”

Emery focused on the ragged edges of her cuticles.  “I spent a long time getting used to the idea of dying, Roman, and after a while, it wasn’t dying that scared me; it was dying without ever having gotten to live.  All I knew were hospitals and sickness.  For the first time in my life, I get to have something more.  I can’t let that go, no matter what.”  She wasn’t normally so blunt with people, but she wanted Roman to know the truth, only partially because she wanted him to stop trying to protect her from everything.

Roman laid a hand gently on her shoulder, but his fingers pressed slightly.  Emery was fairly certain that it was because her admission made him much more unsettled than it did her.

“I’m not sure I completely understand,” he said.  “But I will try not to stand in your way anymore.”

“You weren’t…” she started.

“I was.  But it wasn’t on purpose.  I just wanted you to be safe,” Roman said, letting his hand fall back into his lap.

“I know.”

“It was selfish of me,” Roman said.  The admission seemed to weigh on him as though he was letting someone down.

Emery laid her hand on top of his.  “It was,” Emery agreed.  “But being selfish is just a part of being human.”

Roman raised his eyebrows.  “I’m not human, Emery.”  His voice was proud, and just a little bitter.

“No?”

Now Roman was scowling at her.  “What is your point?”

She shrugged and looked up at the sky.  “Just that I disagree with your father.  ‘Humanity’ is a much more inclusive concept than you might think.  It is certainly an egotistical term, but we never really had any reason to come up with a new one before now.”

“My father never said that humanity was something that we, by definition, could never possess.  Those were my words.  I’m not certain they encompass his meaning at all.”

Emery looked over at Roman and smiled gently.  “Only you know the answer to that, Roman.  But what I do know is that for decades before the Atrians arrived, writers, poets, directors, artists, they were all exploring the idea: What it means to be human.”

Roman met her eyes now.  “And what conclusion did they come to?”  He didn’t sound exactly hopeful, but he sound curious at least.

“Definitively?  Nothing.  There is no one right answer.  Perhaps the most common thread was the capacity for complex and even conflicting emotions.  That, and mortality.  I suppose dying is as important to humanity as living is.”

Emery couldn’t quite read the expression on Roman’s face.  “What most often satisfied those conditions?”

“Hmm…robots, cyborgs, disembodied consciousnesses.”  She paused before she said softly, “Aliens.”

Roman leaned back on his elbows, chuckling softly.  It surprise Emery to hear warmth in his laugh instead of bitterness.  “So far,” he said, “the Atrians are the only one of those things that are real.”

Emery laughed too.  “So far, yes.  But until 10 years ago, you weren’t real to us either.”

“So these beings were accepted as humans?”

Emery sighed.  “Not always.  Almost never at first.  In some of the stories, they won the rights or acceptance they were seeking.  In some they did not.  But the stories mirrored our past as much as they explored possible futures.  Humanity can be a wonderful thing, but it is also a terrible one.  But one thing that was almost always true by the end of the story was that _you_ knew the character was as human as you were, regardless of what society believed.”

“The characters were all written by humans, you know,” Roman said.

Emery laughed again.  “True.  Maybe a better test would be for you to read the books or watch the movies and tell me whether by the end you feel the character is as Atrian as you are.”

Roman’s eyes traced the stars in the sky, as if he were casually looking for something.  ‘Home,’ her mind offered.

“Do you have any of these books?” he asked.

She gave him a rueful smile that he caught out of the corner of his eye.  “I spent most of my life in a hospital bed.  I have mountains of them.”

Something that looked suspiciously like sorrow flickered over his face and then was gone.  He turned to face her and smiled the most genuine, lighthearted smile she had seen from him since that night in the woods, before his father had died.  “Well if you will pick one of them out for me, I would be happy to test it for you.”  His eyes were bright at that moment with laughter and teasing.

Emery smiled back, already running through a mental catalog of her favorite books in her head.  “Deal.”


End file.
